Sex Drive Daily is moving — I’ll be blogging sex-tech over at reginalynn.com, starting today. (I’d have posted this yesterday but figured April 1 was not the right day to announce something that’s true.)

A "recreated" version of Amsterdam on Second Life sold today for $50,000 on eBay. The recreation includes, of course, Amsterdam’s free-wheeling Red-Light District, where plenty of activities are, well, available.

In real life, Amsterdam is a neat place except for the outdoor urinals and the renegade scooters waiting to crash into oblivious tourists like myself. Here’s hoping the Second Life version never gets quite that realistic. (Although if visitors can run into the queen at the local patisserie, as a friend of mine did recently, that would be nifty.)

By the way, Regina Lynn is taking a few days off but she’ll be back soon. Keep a lookout for her weekly column: She’s interviewing Second Life/Amsterdam creator Stroker Serpentine.

Prostitution, as you know, is difficult to understand. Why do people do it? Some might say it has to do with money and gender and — I’m going out on a limb here — sex.

Economists apparently have been looking at those first two factors. But now, some naysayers — a team of three European economists — say stigma and reputation are major players:

The whole situation, seemingly so complicated, boils down to a nicepartial differential equation. Here it is — … rule of thumb for prostitutes. You, a prostitute, find itworthwhile to sell your services when:

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w – [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]

Or, to put it in another simple and easy-to-understand way: "An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for sellingthe first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsenedreputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluatedat zero prostitution sold."

We’re looking forward to an in-depth analysis of the complex economic factors underlying the words "Hey, honey, how much?"

Forget inches. The new way to measure male endowment may be all about volume.

That’s the hope, at least, of the man who recently received a patent (#7,147,609, if you’re scoring at home) for a "penile volumetric measuring device."

Essentially, the device is a container of fluid, and "the volumetric measurement is determined by measuring the amount of displaced fluid after the insertion of the body part through the body part opening."

"In a preferred embodiment, the body part being measured is"… well, you know.

This may all sound a bit silly, but actually scientists (and ordinary guys) have long wondered about exactly how to measure the male member. (For more, check out this expansive Wikipedia entry.) This is why no one knows exactly what the average measurement is.

Given that Sex Toys TVNSFW is a project of a sex toy store, perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised — and disappointed — that its videos are all commercials. And not very interesting ones at that.

I’d love to see an actual show, something like Call for Help, in which you can call and ask your questions and have the experts coach you through your difficulties. And I think the videos should address the challenges of various products — what chafes, what has a bad angle, what might cause allergies.

At the moment, the site doesn’t have a link to send in your questions or topics you’d be interested in, which is a pretty big oversight. It’s an interactive medium and it’s content built around the most interactive interactivity there is — so don’t make it so hard for the audience to get involved.

Airport security has a heavy burden these days, trying to stop the illegal smuggling of lip glosses and shampoos onto airplanes, but customs officials have it even worse: they have to find all that dangerous pornography that could be carried into the country on innocent-seeming laptops.

Never mind that even if your laptop has absolutely nothing naughty on it at the border, you could still download adult content as soon as you got to your hotel room.

Never mind that this has to be the most useless way of finding child pornographers or their customers.

Never mind that adult material is legal in both the United States and Canada, so if you do have racy images on your machine that aren’t of children, you should be able to go about your business.

Blogger Tom Kyte
recently spent time with a Canadian customs officer who sounds earnestand polite but who was obviously trying to do his job without any ideaof quite how to go about it.

Here’s a taste:

He looks surprised and says "it needs a password". I was like -
that is OK, I have it, here you go… Now he is logged in. But – mydesktop looks a tad different from most – there is no IE on thedesktop, just the recycle bin and a folder called programs – nothingelse.

He really doesn’t know what to do now. No specialsearching software, nothing. He looks at me and says "you know what weare doing here right?". I said – not really (I knew what we weredoing, I read the news and all, but just said "no"). "Well" he says"we are looking for pornography". Ahh I say… Ok, no problem.

Buthe is stuck. There is nothing familiar. So he clicks on the startmenu and finds "My Pictures". You know, if I was into that – that isprecisely where I would stick all of my porn – right there in "MyPictures". He goes into it – and sees all of my folders. And all of mypictures, which we looked at. He said "wow, you travel a lot", I said"yup".

PervScan has some good commentary
on the episode, pointing out that if officials are supposed to searchfor illegal digital material the should be trained how, and that theless effective the searches are, the less careful the childpornographers need to be about distributing their wares. The easier it is for them, the more the abuse will proliferate.

A federal judge has struck down a 1998 law that held porn webmasters accountable for minors accessing their sites, and the judge has put his finger on a vitally important point that gets lost amidst all the hand-wringing and wailing about protecting the children:

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendmentprotections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped awayin the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District JudgeLowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

The very first issue of Wired magazine included an article about why sex, tech and new media play so nicely together. And while some things have changed radically in the past 14 years — no more $12-an-hour Compuserve porn — the basics have not: we’re still lusty, we’re still somewhat ashamed of our behavior but doing it anyway, we’re still seeking novelty and pleasure and power and understanding and sometimes even just a simple quick climax with no intention of self-discovery or advancing the range of human sexuality.

Back in the dawn of online when a service called The Source was stillin flower, a woman I once knew used to log on as "This is a nakedlady." She wasn’t naked of course, except in the minds of hundreds ofyoung and not-so-young males who also logged on to The Source. Nightafter night, they sent her unremitting text streams of detailed wetdreams, hoping to engage her in online exchanges known as "hot chat" -
a way of engaging in a mutual fantasy typically found only through1-900 telephone services. In return, "The Naked Lady" egged on herdigital admirers with leading questions larded with copious amounts ofdouble entendre.

When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to "justfooling around on the wires."

"It’s just a hobby," she said. "Maybe I’ll get some dates out of it.
Some of these guys have very creative and interesting fantasy lives."

At the start, The Naked Lady was a rather mousy person – the type whofavored gray clothing of a conservative cut – and was the paragon ofshy and retiring womanhood. Seeing her on the street, you’d neverthink that her online persona was one that excited the libidos ofdozens of men every night.

But as her months of online flirtations progressed, a strangetransformation came over her: She became (through the dint of herblazing typing speed) the kind of person that could keep a dozen ormore online sessions of hot chat going at a time. She got a trendyhaircut. Her clothing tastes went from Peck and Peck to tight skirtsslit up the thigh. She began regaling me with descriptions of herexpanding lingerie collection. Her speech became bawdier, her jokesnaughtier. In short, she was becoming her online personality – lewd,
bawdy, sexy, a man-eater.